Will the Real Satoshi Nakamoto Please Stand Up?

Newsweek contends that a man in Southern California was the creator of Bitcoin.Credit

TOKYO — Satoshi Nakamoto of Fujisawa, Japan, is a shoe repairman.

Satoshi Nakamoto of Hiroshima is preparing to open a men’s clothing store. And Satoshi Nakamoto in Tokyo is a Primal Scream-loving former worker at a rental music studio, according to the studio’s Twitter feed.

There are at least 28 other Satoshi Nakamotos with listed phone numbers in Japan, and even more on Facebook. Like Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, the California man profiled in a recent Newsweek article, they all deny creating Bitcoin, the virtual currency.

The identity of the math genius credited as the architect of Bitcoin has been a long-running curiosity among Bitcoin believers and the public at large ever since the online currency was created. But since the Newsweek article emerged, there has been a renewed interest in pinning down the “real” Satoshi Nakamoto. And although it has been widely suggested that the name may just be a pseudonym for a person or group of people, those who are named such have been getting a lot of attention.

“It’s not me. I only heard of Bitcoin a few months ago, and it sounds risky,” Satoshi Nakamoto said from his “Leather Clinic” shoe-and-bag repair shop in Fujisawa, just south of Tokyo.

“I was amused to hear we had the same name, but I prefer real money to virtual money,” said Satoshi Nakamoto of Hiroshima, who recently moved to Tokyo to open “Decollo,” a clothing store for fashion-conscious “salarymen” in Tokyo.

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Newsweek called the name Satoshi Nakamoto “distinctive.” But if the magazine’s investigation had extended to Japan, where that name originates, it would have found that neither of those names are, in fact, distinctive.

About 50,000 people share the Nakamoto family name in Japan, written here using at least five different combinations of characters, according to Hiroshi Morioka, an expert on the study of Japanese surnames. In its most common rendering — using the characters for “middle” and “main,” — Nakamoto is Japan’s 487th most common family name out of over 100,000 known surnames here, he said.

Satoshi, meanwhile, was among Japan’s top most common given names for boys in the 1960s and 1970s, though the moniker’s popularity has fallen in recent years, according to an annual survey of given names by Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance.

It does not help that the exact rendering in Japanese of the Satoshi Nakamoto of Bitcoin fame remain unknown. A Japanese translation exists of the 2008 paper in which Mr. Nakamoto laid out his design of a new digital currency.

Prepared by Roger Ver, a Bitcoin angel investor, the Japanese document is signed in Japanese. But the characters used were just guesswork, Mr. Ver said in an email. “There isn’t any evidence that the Bitcoin Satoshi ever wrote anything in Japanese, ever,” he said.

Written in a variety of ways, other Satoshi Nakamotos identified across Japan include an obstetrician, a councilman, a tour bus operator; an official in the Tottori prefecture office, the president of a company that makes food sterilization devices, a marketing consultant, as well as employees of Mitsubishi Electric, JFE Steel, Itochu and Asahi Calpis Beverage.

One of the likelier candidates, a researcher in telecommunications engineering at Kobe University, did not return a request for comment.

Of course, there is the issue of English language ability. Most Satoshi Nakamotos here are unlikely to be able to write in the lucid English that characterize the Bitcoin founder’s known writing style.

If the name is indeed a pseudonym, one frequently cited candidate is the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, of Kyoto University. The professor shot to Bitcoin fame last year after Ted Nelson, the American technologist, singled him out as a figure who seemed to fit the known traits of the Bitcoin creator: genius, reclusiveness and English ability.

Mr. Mochizuki, has so far declined to give any statement to the media. A research assistant said that he “absolutely refused to comment.”